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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#141

Post by setr »

robenkleene wrote: post #73
thatguyagain wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Email is supposed to be easy to quote" Since when? I have never heard anyone say this in my entire life. I want emails to look good. So I guess people are different and we can't draw a simple conclusion about what people want from email?

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Is it that you’ve never heard of the concept of quoting a passage of an email? Or are you saying “sure people do that, but it doesn’t matter if it’s easy”?

He means that he’s never heard of it as a “supposed to be”, or rather, a core feature/reason to use email.

Which is my experience as well — it happens to be easy to quote.

The real quoting that email supports, the reply w/ embedded copy of replied email, is unaffected by html/plaintext choice.

Re: Use plaintext email

#142

Post by camillomiller »

The attitude of high-skilled tech people to think that their stripped down, interface-less, and brutalist version of something has to be simply better than anything else needs its own German term, something like Schadenfreude or Treppenwitz. I'm sure some of the German readers here can work out something.

Re: Use plaintext email

#143

Post by jgtrosh »

kgwxd wrote: post #121
taneq wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, work mailboxes are a treasure trove of automatically-archived information. I'd argue that these days, emails form more of a "knowledge base" than any other single repository of information for most organisations.

This is very true and yet the search tools supplied with these knowledge bases are terribly inadequate. Is there a better, standalone tool out there for turning email archives, from multiple sources, into a usable database with a powerful query language?

Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but you could use notmuch[0]. Haven't used it a lot, but I think it can import an mbox? Maybe you can merge multiple mboxes together?

[0]: https://notmuchmail.org

Re: Use plaintext email

#144

Post by bwat49 »

zepolen wrote: post #136
josho wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?

images loading..2% images loading..15% images loading..29% images loading..42% images loading..58% images loading..74% images loading..89% images loading..100% ____________________________________ | | | O O | | O | | \_/ | | MY LOGO | | My catchphrase | | | | | | | |------------------------------------| | | | Hi josho! | | | | This is why it's slower to read! | | | |____________________________________|

A decent email client will load images asynchronously. Many can also be configured to not load remote content at all until you allow it.

Re: Use plaintext email

#145

Post by johannes1234321 »

wyldfire wrote: post #134
ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. It really does. Color, especially helps people find the relevant/critical part.

Unless the recepient is color blind or has another impairment. Also instead of highlighting important parts, one might focus on important parts in the first place.

That said there are valid uses for formatting. But unfortunately most of the formatted mails are harder to digest than needed. Especially if it becomes a longer exchange and people start highlighting in quoted mails.

Re: Use plaintext email

#146

Post by masukomi »

wongarsu wrote: post #19
DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page footer might interest you. It directly answers your question. Quoting "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.

But emails can be reference documents too! In fact I would argue most work emails that are longer than a few lines are a reference document of some sort.

email is a terrible place to keep reference documents.

"where's the information on that?" "oh, you should have it in your email somewhere. I think I got one a few months ago about it"

no. just. no. If you care _at all_ about your reference documents you get them out of email ASAP.

And that's ignoring that anyone can delete old emails and thus not have what you considered a reference doc but they just considered old mail. Or that the server could loose your emails and no-one has they synced locally these days.

Re: Use plaintext email

#147

Post by u801e »

ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication.

Yet, you cannot do any of that on HN (other than a limited case like italic). But, we can communicate just fine without those features.

I suppose it's really a difference of a read once message versus having a discussion. In a read once message, you can format it like you describe. That's how most blogs and web pages work. But if you want to have a discussion, then plain text with very limited markup works best since it minimizes the required vertical scrolling and it allows you to see the overall discussion since you can view more messages in the given screen space.

Re: Use plaintext email

#148

Post by zepolen »

zaarn wrote: post #64
u801e wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can make Text-only links look fairly harmless too. Could you give an example? As far as I know, you cannot do something like making a link look like it belongs to a completely different domain.

Examples from what I've seen: https://account:paypal.com.login@verified-account.com/phish This, to the untrained eye, might at first glance look like a paypal.com link. In fact, it belongs to verified-account.com and it abuses the capability of URLs to contain a username and password to make it look legit.

Don't even need that account: at start, this works in chrome:

https://www.paypal.com@google.com

Re: Use plaintext email

#149

Post by pmlnr »

wyldfire wrote: post #134
ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. It really does. Color, especially helps people find the relevant/critical part.

No, this is not true at all. People will _only_ read the color part and skip anything else, which is equally bad to not finding it immediately, if not worse.

And there are also color blind people for whom the color might be even worse than the lack of it.

Re: Use plaintext email

#150

Post by u801e »

masukomi wrote: post #146
wongarsu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But emails can be reference documents too! In fact I would argue most work emails that are longer than a few lines are a reference document of some sort.

email is a terrible place to keep reference documents. "where's the information on that?" "oh, you should have it in your email somewhere. I think I got one a few months ago about it" no. just. no. If you care _at all_ about your reference documents you get them out of email ASAP. And that's ignoring that anyone can delete old emails and thus not have what you considered a reference doc but they just considered old m…

> email is a terrible place to keep reference documents.

Newsgroups are better in that regard. You can reference the message using the message-id value. A lot of newsgroups would have FAQS posted every 30 days or so. A reference document that's periodically updated could be sent the same way.

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